World of the Bizarre

More anomalies spotted in Mars photographs

By T.K. Randall
September 26, 2014

Image: OSIRIS Mars True Color
Credit: ESA and MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA / CC BY-SA 3.0 (adapted) Thanks to the plethora of high quality images returned by NASA's rovers, Mars has become a prime example of how the brain can be tricked in to interpreting an otherwise abstract pattern as something of significance - a phenomenon known as pareidolia.

The first of the two most recent finds is a rock formation that looks a bit like a set of traffic lights. It consists of a tall stone with several small stones spaced vertically up the side of it. "I saw this one and I thought 'hang on, that looks a bit strange,'" said space video journalist Joe Smith who first came across the object. "I posted it on the internet and people said they thought it looked like a set of traffic lights too - although some people did say it looked like a totem pole."

The second object, a perfectly spherical rock, was found a few days earlier by NASA themselves. Scientists explained that the ball was likely to have been formed by repeated compacting and hardening - a process known as concretion.

Source: Mail Online

Tags: Mars